by Joe Lonergan
Have you ever wondered where Alexa got its name?
First, you can try saying Alexa where did you get your name, and your Echo smart speaker will reply “my name comes from the library of Alexandria which stores the knowledge of the ancient world”.
Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognised with higher precision. But not everybody is happy with the name Alexa, especially not those people that are called Alexa. In fact, there are over 130,000 people in the US that have the name Alexa. Some people have reported confusion because there are so many smart speakers out there now as users call out to the virtual assistant and so the confusion starts. Also, some adults and kids called Alexa have been teased by people saying their names and giving them commands. Following all of this there was an article in the Washington Post called Amazon give us our name back. Amazon responded to the problem of bullying and harassment of people named Alexa by saying we condemn it in the strongest possible terms. We designed our voice assistant to reflect qualities we value in people — being smart, considerate, empathetic, and inclusive. As an alternative to Alexa, we offer several other wake words customers can choose from, including Echo, Computer, Amazon, and Ziggy.
What About Siri?
If you ask the Virtual assistant Siri, how did you get your name it will simply respond “like it says on the box! Apple in California designed me”. If you look into it a bit more Apple decided, they had to find a name that was easy to say and easy to remember and a not-too-common human name.
The CEO of Siri was from Norway and the word Siri is inspired by a Norwegian word that means beautiful woman that leads you to victory. But when Apple bought Siri to integrate into their iPhone 4, Steve Jobs reportedly did not actually like the name, but Apple stuck with it because nobody could dream up anything better that he liked. The name is now also used as shorthand for “Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface.”.